Historical Notes

The Twenty-first Annual Meeting of the Utah State Historical Society will be held in Salt Lake City on Saturday, September 8, 1973. Details on the program will be announced in the Society's Newsletter, and registration information will be mailed to all members and to others upon request.

An article published in Utah Historical Quarterly, Fall 1971, has received the Mormon History Association's award for the best recent article on Mormon history. The $25 award was presented at the association's April 1973 meeting in Salt Lake City to Henry J. Wolfinger for "A Reexamination of the Woodruff Manifesto in the Light of Utah Constitutional History.* , The association granted a special award to S. George Ellsworth for his seventh grade history text, Utah's Heritage, which was published last year by Peregrine Smith, Incorporated.

The diary of Seymour Bicknell Young (1837-1924) for the years 1876-85 has been accessioned by the Utah State Historical Society library. The record includes numerous comments on news events of the day, a report of Brigham Young's final illness and death, and information on medical practice (Young was an M.D.) and church and territorial affairs. The diary ends twenty-seven months after Young's appointment to the LDS First Council of Seventy.

A biographical article about a poet son of Mormon leader Joseph Smith, "The Sweet Singer of Israel: David Flyrum Smith," by Paul M. Edwards was given Courage magazine's best article award for 1972. A plaque noting the award was presented at the Mormon History Association meeting April 5. The article appeared in Courage: A Journal of History, Thought, and Action, Summer 1972 issue, and earlier in Brigham Young University Studies, Winter 1972.

The 1900 Census records, scheduled to open in 1972, will remain closed temporarily at the request of the Department of Commerce. The action was requested pending the resolution of questions over confidentiality and public access.

The Newberry Library and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation— an organization representing eleven mid-western universities—will develop a new center for the history of the American Indian at the Newberry Library. A five-year program has been planned to develop the center with the first year devoted to planning. Aims of the center include the encouragement of study in the field of Indian studies and the making of research and study material available at all levels of education. The center plans to offer postgraduate fellowships and employ pre-doctoral fellows to work in the field of American Indian history. Preference will be given to American Indians. Institutes for high school teachers and biliographies available in microprint will encourage teaching of Indian history in the schools.

The diaries of Richard W. Young, Jr., a Mormon missionary in England, 1909-11, and of Richard W. Young, Sr., 1877-78, 1882, have been received at Western Americana, Marriott Library, University of Utah. The latter includes a description of the death of Brigham Young (the diarist's grandfather) in 1877. Other recent additions to the library are a collection of Brigham Youngspeeches, a manuscript map of Fort Bridger drawn in 1858 by Capt. James A. Simpson of the Topographical Engineers, and the only known copy of the 1862 Denver edition of a Table of Distances of the Ben Holladay Stage Line.

The papers of Reed Smoot, U.S. Senator from Utah, 1903-13, have been inventoried by the Brigham Young University Archives. The collection includes Smoot's diaries (1880-1932) and materials on government finance, tariff, war debts, taxation, and his relationships with presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

Letters from Ezra Taft Benson and others are included in the collection of letters concerning agricultural problems during the Eisenhower years received at the Archives of Contemporary History at the University of Wyoming.

A Journal of Ethnic Studies will be published by the College of Ethnic Studies at Western Washington State College, Bellingham, Washington 98225. According to managing editor Jeffrey D. Wilner the journal will be an interdisciplinary quarterly devoted to articles on the history, literature, art, and social and cultural institutions of Black, Chicano, Indian, and Asian Americans.